LSI Licenses Various Technologies from Rambus

LSI Corp. and Rambus have signed a patent license agreement. The contract allows LSI to include Rambus patented technologies in all its products. In addition, the two companies have settled all outstanding claims, including pending disputes related to Rambus’ patented inventions. This patent license agreement will terminate in 2018.

“Reaching this agreement with LSI is an important step as we look forward to deeper engagement and collaboration with the industry. We are committed to the ongoing development of superior technologies that bring value to our customers as we help bring innovative technologies and products to market,” said Kevin Donnelly, senior vice president and general manager of the memory and interface division at Rambus.

Historically, Rambus only sued companies developing chips that contained memory controllers or who made dynamic random access memory, alleging them of patent infringement since it had several DRAM-related patents. In the recent years the company acquired patents that covered numerous industry-standard technologies, such as PCI Express, certain Serial ATA, certain Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and DisplayPort interfaces. LSI was one of the defendants. It is likely that LSI decided to pay Rambus rather than to fight it in court.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Rambus updated its revenue guidance for the quarter ending March 31, 2013. With the addition of a one-time payment license agreement, the company revised its revenue guidance for the quarter to be between $65 million to $69 million. Rambus initially provided revenue guidance for the quarter in the range of $58 million to $63 million.